https://apanews.net/gambian-imam-leads-campaign-for-bill-unbanning-fgm/
APA-Banjul (The Gambia) Abdoulie Fatty, a well known campaigner to unban female genital mutilation has taken this evangelism to The Gambian national assembly in support of a Bill which seeks to reverse the ban.
Imam Fatty on Monday led a bunch of other clerics and some veiled schoolgirls to the bowel of the national assembly in Banjul as the Bill championed by an MP was brought to the floor of the House and subjected to a debate.
Just a few feet away sat a gaggle of fiery anti-FGM amazons from among Gambia’s gender activists who have been up in arms against the Bill ever since it was crafted by Almamy Gibba, the MP for Foni Kansala.
Gibba belongs to a faction of the former ruling Alliance for the Patriotic Reorientation and Construction (APRC) of exiled ex-president Yahya Jammeh.
The other faction is led by current national assembly speaker Fabakary Tombong Jatta.
Anti-FGM activists have described it as a sad day in Gambian history.
The practice of female circumcision was criminalised in The Gambia in 2015 during which then President Jammeh described it as a watershed moment ushering his country unrelentingly into the 21st century when such tendencies which scar women and girls for life have no place in her future.
However, nine years after the ban, both local and international activists have been warning that anti-FGM legislation was under threat from an unyielding campaign by mostly religious scholars and custodians of tradition to ”bring it back from the dead”.
Religious clerics have taken their campaign a step further, paying the fines of FGM practitioners prosecuted and found guilty of breaking the anti-FGM law and using scripture to justify the practice as virtuous in Islam.
It elicited a response from continental watchdogs such as the African Committee of Experts on the Rights and Welfare of the Child which had joined forces with an array of civil society groups in The Gambia criticising a ‘regressive parliamentary debate’ on the issue and overlooking a commitment to protect women and girls against the injurious consequences of FGM.
An amendment of the Women’s Act of 2010 was passed into law in 2015.It is informed by a series of legal instruments under the Maputo Protocol which was adopted by the African Union in 2003 and ratified by some of its member states.
Although the practice is under a ban in The Gambia, practitioners have gone undercover to indulge the tendency and evade prosecution.
